Wednesday, October 16, 2013

The Republicans' latest manufactured crisis has ALREADY begun to damage the economy and America's position in the world (Felix Salmon)

An excellent piece by Felix Salmon (thanks to Brad DeLong for the tip) illuminates one more aspect of an ever-ramifying subject we might sum up with the title: "Why the US Republican Party Has Become a Threat to the Republic". Does that statement sound like a facetious exaggeration? It isn't.

Salmon's basic point is the following: Even if some kind of last-minute deal is worked out in the next few days, and the US government is not actually pushed into a full-scale default for the first time in its history, that won't mean the country (or the world economy) gets off scot-free. This crisis has already done considerable damage ... and the accumulated damage from the whole series of crises that the Republicans have been deliberately generating ever since they won the House in 2010 is building up. Nor is there any reason to think that the Republicans are going to stop doing this, over and over, with no end in sight. In short:

The global faith in US institutions has already been undermined. [....] The Republicans in the House have already managed to inflict significant, lasting damage to the US and the global economy — even if they were to pass a completely clean bill tomorrow morning, which they won’t. [....] The only question is how much worse it’s going to get.

The big question in Washington this week is whether, in the words of the NYT, we’re going to see “a legislative failure and an economic catastrophe that could ripple through financial markets, foreign capitals, corporate boardrooms, state budget offices and the bank accounts of everyday investors”. In this conception — and I have subscribed to it just as much as anybody else — the sequester is bad, the shutdown is worse, and the default associated with hitting the debt ceiling is so catastrophic as to be unthinkable.

This frame is a useful one, not least for the politicians in Washington, who seem to have become inured to the suffering caused by the shutdown, and downright blasé about the negative consequences of the sequester. Both of them could last more or less indefinitely were it not for the debt ceiling, which is helpfully providing a hard-and-fast deadline: Congress is going to have to come up with a deal before the ceiling is reached, because the alternative is, well, the zombie apocalypse.

[....] But at the same time, the situation is less binary than it looks, not least because the US government is already in default on its obligations.

The best way to look at this, I think, is that there’s a spectrum of default severities. At one end, you have the outright repudiation of sovereign debt, a laEcuador in 2008; at the other end, you have the sequester, which involves telling a large number of government employees that the resources which were promised them will not, in fact, arrive. Both of them involve the government going back on its promises, but some promises are far more binding, and far more important, than others.

Right now, with the shutdown, we’ve already reached the point at which the government is breaking very important promises indeed: we promised to pay hundreds of thousands of government employees a certain amount on certain dates, in return for their honest work. We have broken that promise. Indeed, by Treasury’s own definition, it’s reasonable to say that we have already defaulted: surely, by any sensible conception, the salaries of government employees constitute "legal obligations of the US".

Conversely, if you really do expect zombies to start roaming the streets the minute that the US misses a payment on its Treasury obligations, you’re likely to be disappointed. [....]

[JW: Ironically, that situation will carry its own dangers. When the world doesn't end the day after the US hits the debt ceiling, then the Congressional Republicans who generated the crisis, along with Fox News and the rest of the right-wing propaganda machine, will say that proves it was no big deal after all., so there's no urgency about finding a solution.]

The harm done to the global financial system by a Treasury debt default would not be caused by cash losses to bond investors. If you needed that interest payment, you could always just sell your Treasury bill instead, for an amount extremely close to the total principal and interest due. Rather, the harm done would be a function of the way in which the Treasury market is the risk-free vaseline which greases the entire financial system. If Treasury payments can’t be trusted entirely, then not only do all risk instruments need to be repriced, but so does the most basic counterparty risk of all. The US government, in one form or another, is a counterparty to every single financial player in the world. Its payments have to be certain, or else the whole house of cards risks collapsing — starting with the multi-trillion-dollar interest-rate derivatives market, and moving rapidly from there.

And here’s the problem: we’re already well past the point at which that certainty has been called into question. [....]

The vaseline, in other words, already has sand in it. The global faith in US institutions has already been undermined. The mechanism by which catastrophe would arise has already
been set into motion. And as a result, economic growth in both the US
and the rest of the world will be lower than it should be. Unemployment
will be higher. Social unrest will be more destructive. These things
aren’t as bad now as they would be if we actually got to a point of
payment default. But even a payment default wouldn’t cause mass
overnight failures: the catastrophe would be slower and nastier than
that, less visible, less spectacular. We’re not talking the final scene
of Fight Club, we’re talking more about another global credit crisis — where “credit” means “trust”, and “trust” means “trust in the US government as the one institution which cannot fail”.

While debt default is undoubtedly the worst of all possible worlds, then, the bonkers level of Washington dysfunction on display right now is nearly as bad. Every day that goes past is a day where trust and faith in the US government is evaporating — and once it has evaporated, it will never return. The Republicans in the House have already managed to inflict significant, lasting damage to the US and the global economy — even if they were to pass a completely clean bill tomorrow morning, which they won’t. The default has already started, and is already causing real harm. The only question is how much worse it’s going to get.

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)